


Outflow

by linman



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen, Spec
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-04
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-16 06:41:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3478226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linman/pseuds/linman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re a bastard,” Lesley said, “a real bastard, Nightingale. Is it being a hundred and fifteen? Is that what does it? If you don’t like the weather, just wait ten years?”</p>
<p>Companion piece to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/3436109">Intake</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Outflow

**Author's Note:**

> More self-indulgent jossbait, this time by request. Dedicated to those who wanted to know if Nightingale was okay.
> 
> Thanks as usual to hedda62 and kivrin for beta.

“You go on up,” Lesley said. “I’ll wait down here. No—really—”

“Lesley—”

“I’ll come up the next time.”

“That’s what you said the last time,” Peter said. “And the time before that, when you stayed behind at the Folly. It’s not going to kill you—”

“It might,” Lesley muttered, which Peter ignored.

“—and he probably won’t even be awake.” Like that wouldn’t be even worse, in some ways.

Peter paused to let a shoal of nurses divide around them in the middle of the corridor. They were all chatting to one another, swinging carrier bags and lunch totes, and the mingled scent of several cuisines trailed after them. When they had moved on he turned back to her and lowered his voice.

“It’s only going to get worse the longer you put it off,” he said.

She stopped avoiding his probing gaze and glared back. “Thank you so much for that insight, Peter. That would never have occurred to me if you hadn’t so graciously pointed it out.”

He gave no answer except a small sigh. The problem with sarcasm, she thought, was that you lost too much accuracy the bigger you went. With a ball-peen hammer you could make your victim ache for days; by the time you got to cricket-bat size your only real result was a longsuffering look and a refusal to retaliate.

Having declared her intent to funk out, Lesley was now committed, so she set her feet, crossed her arms, and fixed Peter with a stolid look till he got the picture. Which he did almost at once, but he stared back silently for several seconds just to make his point.

“Okay,” he said wearily at last. “You stay here; I’ll be back down in a little bit.” He turned and continued up the corridor toward the stairs.

“Thank you.” She tried not to be too ungracious in victory. “I’ll just sit here on this nice bench and wait.” Last time she hadn’t even got farther than the main waiting area, so Peter would have to be satisfied with that much progress.

He seemed to be, because he swung back round briefly with a slight grin. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he called.

“Or anything stupid, either?” Lesley called back.

His grin flashed brighter, then he turned and lengthened his stride.

When he was gone she sighed deeply, and might have stood there lingering over the sigh, except that another cadre of nurses was bearing down on her, and she decided to get out of traffic. She took her seat on the end of the bench and watched the people pass. It was shift change; she recognized the pattern of fresh-garbed medicos spreading through the corridors to take over from the workday-grimed ones. They coalesced in eddies of briefings and pleasantries, exchanging flip-charts and notebooks and electronic devices, clicking pens and sneaking out stashed chocolates. Hospital patterns were hatefully familiar to her.

Other people had nightmares about showing up for a final exam for classes they hadn’t taken, or doing the shopping only to look down and find they were stark naked; Lesley had nightmares about surgeries. Most of them were tedious enough that she could wake up, brush them off, and go back to sleep. Most of them weren’t really worse than reality, in which she had often thought it was the last time she would submit to yet another shuddering erasure of consciousness. Except she always did what had to be done, in the end. Cowardice was a bit of a luxury, and today Lesley was going to get what enjoyment she could out of it.

Across the corridor on the opposite wall was a large bulletin board stuck all over with notices, glossy advertisements for study opportunities, and curling flyers on colored office stock. If Peter took an especially long time, she would get up and read them—but she’d save that till she was really bored. In the wake of the shift change, visitors and outpatients were coursing down the corridor; she took note clinically of their reaction to her as they passed her on her bench. Some averted their eyes at once; some stared till they encountered her steady gaze and then snatched their eyes away abruptly. The ones who stared longest were usually children, drinking her in with troubled looks, like a mirror to the cautionary tale she so manifestly was.

Soon even the spate of visitors had passed, and the corridor became relatively quiet, except for a rendezvous of medical trolleys at one end and an old man in a dressing gown taking his constitutional at the other. Lesley sighed again, in what could hardly even be called relief; she was getting used to the ordinariness of the public eye—and the public eye seemed to be getting used to her face.

“It helps that you’re willing to look out of it,” Peter had said to her one afternoon while he was collating paperwork and she was indulging herself in a small sulk. “You can’t look alive if you close yourself off.”

“And that makes it all better, does it?” she’d said sourly. “A miracle caused by attitude?”

“No. At least, not a miracle in the sense of arbitrary interference with the course of natural events.” She recognized the fruity tongue-in-cheek tone; Peter used it when he was either quoting Newton or pretending to paraphrase him.

Lesley snorted. “And what other sense is there? The greeting-card metaphorical sense?”

Peter tamped down his collated files and stuffed them into a satchel. “Well, it’s true greeting cards don’t really do it justice.”

“Do what justice?”

“The other sense of miracle.” Peter’s eyes lit on hers briefly, warm and steady. “Something for which you’re really, really grateful.”

And then he’d gone away, leaving Lesley to reflect that Peter had surpassed Nightingale in the art of delivering exit lines like that.

She’d had to tell Peter about the surgery dreams, to stop him fretting. But she hadn’t told him that in the really scary ones, Nightingale was always the surgeon.

She leaned her head against the wall behind her, preparing to endure. If she was going to enjoy a spot of cowardice she could just as well have done it at home, she thought, instead of sitting here in a place she hated, courting bad dreams. The corridor had become quiet; the only sounds were the distant low trill of phones and the occasional scratch of the intercom as someone was paged, and the slow thump of the old man’s four-footed cane. He would pass her presently; Lesley let her eyes unfocus so as not to tempt him to greet her.

But he didn’t pass. Instead he sank down slowly onto the other end of her bench, with a neat flip of the tasseled ties of his dressing gown, and arranged the cane between his slippers to make a rest for both his thin, strong hands. Lesley turned her head and looked at him squarely for the first time.

It wasn’t an old man at all—or at least, not in the usual sense—but she could see why he’d read that way at a distance. He was thin, almost transparent, like onionskin paper, and with about as much color. The paisley dressing gown was the most vivid thing about him, as effective as a glamor for displacing her focus. His head was cocked slightly toward her, his heavy-lidded gaze lingering on the bulletin board across from them, and he would have looked very pleased with himself if he weren’t working at breathing without wheezing.

She did a quick recce of the corridor, one end and then the other—no Peter returning, no one in pursuit—and then turned her interrogative frown to Nightingale directly.

He took three breaths in preparation and then spoke in a voice as thin and diminished as the rest of him. “Prestidigitation,” he said to the colored flyers. “The hand is quicker than the eye.”

Lesley declined to unpack the layers of commentary in that. “How much quicker?” she said dryly.

“Oh, I’d judge…about twenty minutes’ worth. Then I’m for it.”

She digested this. Then she said, “I don’t think it’s going to take Peter a full twenty minutes to figure out what you’ve done.”

“No, he’ll have twigged by now.” Nightingale took another fortifying breath. “The rest of the time…he’ll devote to concealing my disappearance from the medical authorities.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You worked this out with him beforehand?”

“No,” he said simply. “I just know him very, very well.”

The corollary to that, of course, was that he knew  _her_ very well, too—or he wouldn’t have mustered the strength for this trip. Lesley sat back against the wall and let out an aggravated sigh.

“You’ve just spoiled a perfectly good interlude of cowardice,” she said. “Thanks a lot.”

She waited for the inevitable dry riposte. But it didn’t come.  She frowned at him again; he’d caught his breath and was now just sitting there serenely, as if they were spending this twenty minutes waiting for the tube together. She recognized the tactic, one which she hated—and it only made it worse that she didn’t know whether Peter had picked it up from him, or the other way round. At least with Peter you could tell when he was woolgathering and when he was outwaiting you; with Nightingale you were never sure if anything you were about to do would matter to him at all.

“So then, what?” she said, sharply. “You went to all this trouble. What is it?”

He turned his head toward her with a slight smile, but some weird restraint kept him from bringing his eyes to meet hers. Nor did he give her any answer in words.

“So I’m supposed to guess, is it?” she said. “Just great.”

There was nothing stopping her from getting up and walking out of this fucking hospital and back to the Folly, though it would probably get her in trouble. Nothing except her own damnable sense of commitment, that is. If she was going to have to see Nightingale at all, she might as well just fucking go through with it. Which he knew very well. Which was why she was never going to goad him into saying anything.

She had hated Nightingale for a while, but that had burnt itself down until she’d realized that she mostly hated him because she had wronged him. He would have been dead if it had depended on her; instead he was making a glacial recovery in hospital, which some called uncanny and some called a miracle—and for which Lesley ought to have been really, really grateful. But the best she could do was throw out the smoldering remains of hostility, and vow to herself that from now on she would hate Nightingale only for himself.

She could find grounds for it, she thought now. Starting with his love of playing the unmoved mover, dragging his arse out of bed merely for the privilege of sitting on a bench and being serene at her.

“You’re a bastard,” she said, “a real bastard, Nightingale. Is it being a hundred and fifteen? Is that what does it? If you don’t like the weather, just wait ten years?”

He certainly looked like he was prepared to wait ten years for a change in the weather. He still hadn’t looked at her; he was staring thoughtfully at a point on the wall, the frown lines precisely etched in the papery skin of his brow. “Are you even listening?” she demanded.

Nightingale went very still. He was listening, she knew suddenly. And he wasn’t looking at her because he was done coming after her with wrath and power. She was the hospital visitor, but it was he who had come to sit with her—not to kill, and not to save: just to attend.

She swallowed once, and then again, at the treacherous ache of threatening tears. Crying sucked; not only was it humiliating in general, but the stage of resistance always woke up old pains in her jaw and throat. She sat back against the wall and breathed through it. The silence lengthened, and as it lengthened it changed, from the silence just after disaster, to the engaged stillness that only Peter had ever joined her in, when she let him. It wasn’t the kind of engagement she had ever wanted, least of all with Nightingale, but the disaster (in all its waves) had come and gone and this was all that was left.

She glanced over at him. He was sitting very upright; she suspected it was because the alternative was total collapse. The hair at his temples had darkened with sweat, and his nostrils worked faintly, as if to draw in the most breath without showing obvious effort. Two patients exerting patience, she thought. On the whole, Lesley preferred surgery: at least then you could be unconscious during most of the proceedings. Cowardice was a luxury, in more ways than one.

“ _Vincit qui se vincit_ ,” she murmured.

“Quite,” said Nightingale.

They were silent together for a while longer. She could still feel his attention, oblique but focused, and wanted to deny the sense of nourishment that was soaking in with the passing minutes. She should never have wanted such a thing; she hadn’t wanted it; she had no reason to want it now.

Presently the intercom scratched to life. “Dr. Walid to section three,” said a brisk female voice.

Nightingale sighed. “That’s torn it,” he said. “Just a matter of time now.” He laid his hands on his knees as if about to get up, but thought better of it and replaced them, trembling slightly, on the handle of his cane. “Well, I’m glad we had this little chat.”

“I’m the one who did all the work!” Lesley said.

“Mm,” he said. “I thought you might find that preferable to accepting my compassion at the outset.”

Lesley went briefly still. Then she turned to him and said, low and deadly: “Compassion for what?”

He thought about it a moment. “In the war,” he said finally, “it was always the conscripts who had the hardest time going home.”

_Conscripts?_ She lunged to her feet and turned to face him foursquare. “Nobody is  _making_ me do anything,” she said from between her teeth. “Ever. Again.”

Nightingale met her eyes at last. “I did figure that out, eventually,” he said. “As I’m sure you figured out that it’s perfectly possible to maintain such a policy and still get manipulated.”

Her hands curled into fists; she uncurled them with an effort. “And that’s where the compassion comes in?”

“Certainly not,” said Nightingale. “You’re the one who’s still here, after all.”

Not that she’d planned for that. Lesley brushed the thought aside. “Then get to the point,” she said. “I take my insults black, no sugar.”

“Is that what compassion is to you?” Nightingale’s eyes were locked to hers. This was neither a surgery theatre nor an interview room:  it was worse than both. “The proper occasion for compassion,” he said softly, “is not for what can be helped, but what can’t. Not for what you’ve done or failed to do, but who you are. Not—” his ironic voice gentled further— “the weather recorded in the almanacks or predicted on the wireless, but right now. So, you tell me, Lesley.  _Quel temps fait-il?_ Do you possess an occasion for compassion?”

Things that couldn’t be helped. A person you couldn’t stop being. The weather…there were tears flooding over, running down the only face she had, and she couldn’t do a thing about them. “Too much,” she whispered. “There’s too much.”

Nightingale sat back suddenly and took a long breath, as if he and she had just successfully disarmed a bomb. He was very white. “Welcome to the room, my dear,” he said, and added, with a half-quirk of a smile: “We’re all here.”

A laugh barked itself out of her, because they were. Without breaking Nightingale’s gaze, she was aware of the echoing slaps of many feet coming down the corridor toward them. Within seconds they were surrounded by medics clucking at Nightingale and invading the space between them. “Yes, yes,” Nightingale said, with a mild gesture of his hand, “I’ll come quietly,” and then, whimsically, as a male nurse rolled up with a wheelchair, “And the paddy wagon has arrived. I am much obliged.” He allowed himself to be loaded into it; when he was settled he offered Lesley a seraphic smile, and then directed it on past her shoulder.

She turned to see Dr. Walid planted in the middle of the corridor, arms folded, a strong tower; he afforded her a cool look. Behind him Peter was sucking his teeth to avoid a smile.

“I am sorry if I have occasioned any distress,” Nightingale said; he was speaking to all three of them, and she knew how he meant it towards her.

“I’m sure that will convince the magistrate,” she said dryly.

“Mm. I hope you’re inclined to visit me in prison.” His voice was growing faint again.

“As you’d do for me?”

He smiled in return, but only at the corners of his eyes; he was exhausted, she could tell. The nurse didn’t wait for the pleasantries to conclude; as Nightingale rolled past her he reached out and grasped her arm briefly. She was startled—he had always been so Edwardianly careful never to touch her—and fumbled to acknowledge the gesture before he was borne away to the lifts. The medicos melted away to their other duties.

“I believe that concludes visiting hours,” Dr. Walid said austerely, and then he too was gone, leaving Peter and Lesley alone in the corridor as before.

He turned to her and gave her a long look. She met his eye, unbraced; whatever he was about to say, she would accept.

“So,” Peter said. “Kebabs?”

“Chicken tikka masala sandwiches,” she countered.

“Done.” And as they emerged from the main entrance of the hospital into the watery afternoon sunlight, he added: “You’re buying.”

“Bollocks,” said Lesley.

*

_ fin _


End file.
